Posts Tagged ‘Moral principle’

Al- Hanifa the fierce was a man who had no education and seemingly no wealth as those who had amassed wealth by industry careful attention to managing their capital, labor and industry. He started as a small time thief picking from the many cargoes that were unloaded in the city harbor. In the rough and tumble world he soon rose high and could name his price and the ship owners paid what was demanded. He made money. How to keep all that money without paying tax? He bought a large sprawling godown with one door and began a sweat shop. In order to save expenses he did not care to provide ventilation or fire alarm or first aid. He made workers work longer hours almost for nothing.
Al- Hanifa was a man to reckon with. He could demolish churches if he were paid enough. He paid alms as the Word dictated and still saved from what he withheld as wages to his workers. He could at the wag of a finger muster an army of ruffians to riot, pillage and wreck business of merchant-princes. Once people found his unassailable position those who wanted to settle private scores hired him. The other day it was to attack a diplomat whose only fault was in his own country some stupid fellows made a provocative film of the prophet. Al Hanifa immediately arranged the army of hooligans and some fundamentalists supplied anti-aircraft guns and sophisticated weapons to cause maximum damage.
Unfortunately a week after his godown was gutted by an accident and so died some 400 workers in fire.
When he complained to his handlers the college of Mullahs told him that it was an accident. It didn’t help his case. The widows and children of workers lynched him one night since they did not get any compensation.
The mullahs who used him for their dirty work did not tell him was it was the Moral order that paid him back. It operates at human level and in a way the wicked and violent man will understand. Thus it was with al-Hanifa.
Al-Hanifa lived violently and died violently. Poetic justice it is called.
moral: man who operates for short term gains unjustly has taken refuge in a shooting gallery. Chance in a shooting gallery where certainty is almost a foregone conclusion.

Jew-baiting in Europe was pervasive right from the time the powers- that- be found the Jews a convenient scapegoat. The rulers of principalities funded their wars with the money extorted from the Jews. Torquemada for example comes to mind. Jews were banished from the Catholic Spain. France was not free from this prejudice. That was then.
In the late 19th century France was rocked by a scandal. In its wake their deep seated fear of Jews came to the fore. I cite the collapse of the company that floated the Panama Canal project. In 1888 the company formed by Ferdinand de Lesseps went under with a loss to stockholders, most of them small bourgeois investors, of $300,000,000. From inquiries and trials that followed an endemic corruption in which several cabinet ministers, some 150 members of Parliament and nearly every important newspapers had been bribed off. The company wanted to avoid a crash and money spent at the right quarters allowed the company to stave off an immediate collapse. For the time being. Of these corrupt people only one was found guilty and prosecuted because his conscience prick made him confess! Now the question is how come anti-semitism suddenly became the news of the day? The politicians and corrupt law-givers wanted to save their hides,- and also face, one would think.
The Jews as a nation was a nation within the national life of Russia and as elsewhere, in France also.
There cannot be smoke without fire. In fact there were three Jews who on behalf of the company actually handled the bribing of influential people. In the mass hysteria surely l’affaire Dreyfus was waiting to happen. The man on the street as a result of corruption,divisions lost faith in the Third Republic and in those who ran the Republic. Of course politicians who used the Jews as smoke screen may have escaped immediate retribution but their actions would surely bring disaster. How else one can explain the utter fiasco under which France met the challenge of rising Nazism?
Within a span of six weeks during the balmy May-July days of 1940 the world’s second largest empire were utterly brought to their knees. France may have prided in her culture and civilized way of life but all these would give way to a Fascist dictatorship and an epitome of Totalitarian Political system. Who genuflected shamelessly before the Moloch but the father figure of the French Army, the one and only Philippe Petain?
It is poetic justice that Army caved in when the nation needed them most. The Army had long before their debacle lost their morale in the Dreyfus case.
In 1894 throwing Dreyfus to the wolves in order to protect the Army made the country split in the middle. The Left and Right veered to extreme positions. For the Army, the Catholic Church and the conservative majority it was not the question whether Dreyfus was guilty or not but that it were better that he suffered than sacrifice the prestige and honor of the French Army. With such persuasive argument France walked roughshod over the individual liberties of some individuals as though their lives didn’t count. On a flimsy charge that will never stand in a court of law Captain Dreyfus was publicly disgraced. La Libre Parole a paper noted for her anti-semitism commented next day: “It was not an individual who was degraded here for an individual crime. The shame of an entire race was bared in its nakedness.”
When a nation has sacrificed its moral force what morale can an army muster in case of emergency? When the House has developed a cleft down the middle what hope is left for the inmates? In the face of the national crisis the Cardinal Archbishop of Paris led the prayers and hoped as with the people for a miracle. It was of no use since the Army was sapped by dreams of glory and of the past than of the present.
2.
Curtailing individual liberties of even one person do carry its measure of seeds of poison. If the nation could make short shrift of one it stands to reason there shall be many more cases similarly repeated elsewhere. The accumulated poison shall spread through wind, water, rivers and oceans that in the end will create catastrophe.
benny